Before installing anything these days, I always explicitly run Windows Update. The last thing I want is for an update to kick off in the middle of an install. I encourage you to do the same!

My first attempt to install Beta 2 Professional edition was to be optimistic and install it over Beta 1 on my Vista machine. This dream ended as soon as I run the setup:So I went to the "Programs and Features" page in control panel and removed "Visual Studio Codename Orcas", which removed a whole bunch of other related things. I then run the setup again and life was good:

After clicking "Install" on the dialog above, the first item that the setup tries to install is .NET Framework 3.5. This took absolute ages on my machine (over 10 minutes). Midway through it was obvious that it had invoked Windows Update because Windows Update gave me the message that it wanted to restart my machine. I thought I'd play it safe (and advise you to do the same) so I selected "Postpone for 4 hours" on that dialog. I then waited and eventually the VS2008 setup informed me that a reboot was required. Of course, I accepted that one. After Vista rebooted the setup continued automatically with no intervention on my part. Apparently, some people (without admin accounts) have to start it manually again so your mileage may vary.

So what was the Windows Update thing that was invoked by the setup, especially since I had manually run windows update before? That is the Service Pack 1 for v2.0 and v3.0 of the .NET Framework (fyi, explanation of red bits). The setup knows where to go and look for them and right now they appear as hotfixes: KB929300 and KB110806.

After that, the rest was as smooth as peanut butter (the smooth variety, not the chunky one).